Heavy Metal Shop

When building guitars there are many tools you just can’t find on the market to help organize, maneuver and protect your pieces during construction. If you’re resourceful you’ll find ways to build them or call upon the aid of a friend. The way I see it, a woodshop can’t survive without a metal shop so I called upon buddy Scott Leube, a master of many talents of SGL Guitars in Santa Maria, CA. He’s been known to say, “If you can draw it, I can build it.” Together we designed a variety of tools that we weren’t finding on the market or for an affordable price. This month we’ll take a look at a few of these tools that can really aid a guitar builder or workshop.

The Rotary Rack
The rotary rack helps during grain filling, painting and detailing, allowing you to rotate the instrument 360 degrees in two planes. It features a steering wheel and handrail to rotate your work easily.

The Mobile Rack
The mobile rack is for organizing while in the spray booth, during drying, or prep stages. Different handles can be made to accommodate bolt-on necks and bodies or acoustic guitars.

The Buffing Stand
You can buy buffing arbor kits from places such as stewmac.com or grizzly.com – an online machinery outlet – but no one has a stand available. This stand is built to house a 1.5 HP motor you can find at Harbor Freight or Grizzly with the available arbor kits.

The Guitar Rack
The guitar rack is used for everything from raw wood, sanding and final assembly. It is extremely sturdy and mobile.

The Glue Rack
This medieval-looking contraption features standard ¾” black pipe clamps mounted onto the rack for gluing up to 12 bodies or book-matched tops per glue cycle.

Well, that about does our look at some of the handy inventions Scott and I have put together to make life in the workshop a little easier. If you’d like more info, contact SGL Guitars in Santa Maria, CA at 805-714- 0576. We’ll see you next month.

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